MD student looking for advice in pivoting to a PhD in Pharmacology

I'm a 3rd year MD student at a top university in Australia. My undergraduate degree was biomedical science with a major in pharmacology and neuroscience, with an 83.2 WAM (weighted average), and GPA of 6.86 out of 7 (3.95/4.0 WES iGPA). My MD grades are also decent (74% WAM).

Over the course of my MD I have realized that I'm not passionate about clinical practice, and I dread the idea of staying in clinical medicine. My interest is primarily in pharmacology and drug development. Due to social pressure and other reasons I pursued an MD instead of my original goal, which was a PhD in pharmacology.

I don't have honours or a research master's, so my main weakness is that I have basically no relevant research yet.

I'm taking a year off from my studies next year and am thinking about spending most/all of it working full-time in a pharmacology or drug discovery lab. Ideally I'd like something with a computational/ML component as well as I am particularly interested in ML assisted drug design. I plan to return and complete my MD after this but I don't intend to go on to clinical practice.

How realistic/competitive is my profile for top tier pharmacology PhD programs in Australia/US/Europe? Provided that I managed to get a year's worth of research/lab experience next year?

Has anyone encountered people who have done a PhD in this field after completing an MD, and if you had one year to improve my profile, what would you focus on?